Burnout through the Lenses of Equity/Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and Disabled People: A Scoping Review

Burnout is a problem within the workplace including in higher education, the activity of activism, and in reaction to experiencing systemic discrimination in daily life. Disabled people face problems in all of these areas and therefore are in danger of experiencing “disability burnout”/”disablism burnout”. Equity/equality, diversity, and inclusion” (EDI) linked actions are employed to improve the workplace, especially for marginalized groups including disabled people. How burnout is discussed and what burnout data is generated in the academic literature in relation to EDI and disabled people influences burnout policies, education, and research related to EDI and to disabled people. Therefore, we performed a scoping review study of academic abstracts employing SCOPUS, the 70 databases of EBSCO-HOST and Web of Science with the aim to obtain a better understanding of the academic coverage of burnout concerning disabled people and EDI. We found only 14 relevant abstracts when searching for 12 EDI phrases and five EDI policy frameworks. Within the 764 abstracts covering burnout and different disability terms, a biased coverage around disabled people was evident with disabled people being mostly mentioned as the cause of burnout experienced by others. Only 30 abstracts covered the burnout of disabled people, with eight using the term “autistic burnout”. Disabled activists’ burnout was not covered. No abstract contained the phrase “disability burnout”, but seven relevant hits were obtained using full-text searches of Google Scholar. Our findings suggest that important data is missing to guide evidence-based decision making around burnout and EDI and burnout of disabled people.